SHORT TAKES : Pure Thought Fueled ‘Fantasia’
Animator Ollie Johnston said he wasn’t “on” anything when he worked on the phantasmagoric Walt Disney classic “Fantasia.”
Johnston was one of the legendary “nine old men” who animated Disney features from 1937 into the 1980s. He drew the centaurettes for the Pastorale sequence of “Fantasia,” released in 1940 and due out again Oct. 5.
The cartoon interpretation of classical music was a box-office failure in the 1940s and 1950s. The turning point came in the 1960s, when young people embraced it as a psychedelic trip.
“People have asked what we were ‘on’ when we made the picture,” Johnston laughed during a recent interview. “We weren’t ‘on’ anything.”
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